


Wanting Not to Want

by ViaLethe



Category: The Almighty Johnsons
Genre: F/M, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:12:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2804036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViaLethe/pseuds/ViaLethe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things are not destined to end badly for Gaia.  She tells herself this because she has to believe it, if she ever wants to feel like a real person again, now that Idunn has fled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wanting Not to Want

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ser_dontos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ser_dontos/gifts).



“We can't do this,” she says, her voice falling flat in the empty space between them.

“I know that. Christ, why does everyone think I don't know that?”

“I mean it,” she says, sliding out of his bed, digging through the tangled mess of their clothes to find the bits that belong to her. “You'll kill me if we keep this up.”

“Look, I know my powers of lovemaking are legendary, but I hardly think they're lethal-”

“That's not what I meant, dickhead.” The insult slips from her more out of habit than anything else; she calls him a lot of things, both in her head and out loud – dickhead, prick, fucking wanker – though never either of his names. Never the things the voice in her head wants to call him. “Every time we do this, I lose another piece of myself, like it's being swallowed up in this thing between us or something.”

He's silent, and Gaia takes the moment to duck down, retrieving her bra from where it had ended up (she doesn't care to remember how) underneath the bed. “I know it always ends badly,” she says, turning her back on him before the heat in her blood can start pooling again, before the voice that isn't quite hers can take over. “For Idunn, I mean. I'm not going to be like the last one.”

“You're already not like the last one,” he says, just as she reaches the door, and she can't quite figure how he means that, not even when she risks glancing at him. Usually, when he looks at her it's just with anger, or with the kind of lust that promises her clothes are about to get ripped off.

Now he just looks pensive, and she leaves all the more quickly, before she can begin to feel like she wants to stay.

***

It's more than a year before she sees Anders again, before she pulls herself out of a life she'd been made a ghost in and comes back to Auckland, back to memories and people who know who she is, back to a past that doesn't belong to Idunn and a future that doesn't belong to either of them, Gaia or the goddess she used to be.

She hadn't really expected Axl to understand, and maybe he hadn't really in the end. But he hadn't assumed things would fall back to the way they used to be either, which was...interesting.

(“It's just not like it was anymore, is it?” Axl says, leaning back in some ratty old couch they must have gotten to replace the one that had become fertilizer for an apple tree, watching her across the gap between them. There's something much harder about him now, something with edges. Gaia doesn't want to think too hard about whether she's been the cause of that.

“Reckon not,” she says, and shrugs, and hates the nervous laughter that trails out after her words, hates the memories of what happened in this house, how her perfect life had soured and gone to shit, and ended in bitterness and tears.

“Right, well. People change, eh?” Axl says, and smiles brightly. She's willing to ignore how false it is, willing to ignore anything to have any piece of something good back between them. “Come on,” he says, rising and looming over her, a shadow over her life, “meet my friend Zeb. You'll love him, I promise.”

Zeb hits on her within thirty seconds of being introduced. It's nice to see some things haven't changed, at least.)

***

He's tried to avoid her, she thinks, as much as she's tried to avoid him – no drives past JPR, no accidental strolls past his apartment, an avoidance of clubs and bars in general – but sometimes, there's something like fate still hanging over them all, and this time it's come in the form of a wedding invitation.

(“Why do they even want me there?” she says into her phone. “I barely know your brother Ty.”

“It's a god thing. I think,” Axl says, and it's nice that they're able to chat like this; a little awkward still, maybe, but it's something approaching normal, at least. “Mostly I think Ty just wants people there who know who he is, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I can see how that would be nice.”)

He knows when she comes up behind him at the bar. The set of his shoulders tells her so, the way they stiffen, the way his hand comes up to rub at his neck. He knows, as surely as she's been aware of him orbiting her all night long, the way their eyes seemed to just miss catching each other, time and again.

And maybe Gaia ought to have just left, but she's had two glasses of champagne already, listening to endless toasts on the joys and power of love, and none of it is any fucking fair.

“Is it weird?” she says, speaking to him but careful not to look in his direction, like not seeing what's in front of her might save her this time. “Being without Bragi? I mean, it must be harder to talk women into bed, at least.”

She wonders if he'll be offended, or even wounded, and hides her face behind the sudden need to gulp down her wine. And then she remembers who she's talking to, and why the urge to say that had popped into her head in the first place.

“Is that a challenge?”

“You wish,” she says, and tries not to hope he really does.

“I've never much liked a challenge, actually,” he says. “Ask anyone, they'll tell you what a lazy bastard I am. It's why I liked being Bragi, it made things simpler.”  
Simpler. Well, he sure as shit hadn't made her life any simpler, only tied it in so many knots the only way she could see to get free had been to run, as fast and as far as possible.

But it's not really fair to blame him, she reflects, watching Anders sit here at the bar, watching the way he's isolated himself. So she shrugs, and adds it to her mental list of shit that is Really Not Fair tonight, along with how ridiculously good he smells, and leans in closer.

“What if I challenged you to get very drunk with me?” she says, and feels only relief when he raises his glass.

***

An hour later, the part of her she's still reasonably certain is Gaia is telling her that this was a less than brilliant plan. And yet, words just keep pouring from her mouth.

“Maybe I was never really much of anyone,” she says. “My entire life was a lie. Sometimes I wonder if anyone who ever loved me really loved _me_ , or they just loved the goddess they thought I was meant to be.” Yes, _clearly_ she's had way too much wine, to be confessing all her darkest thoughts to a man who already thinks she's a soppy idiot. She expects him to laugh, and say something rude. She expects, honestly, to be told she's right, because what else is he supposed to say to her now, when the only thing that ever brought them together has gone?

She doesn't expect to be surprised.

“If you're looking for advice, you came to the wrong place,” he says, staring into the depths of his glass. “I was Bragi for my entire adult life, you think I know how the fuck to be a person now?”

She snorts, probably way too indelicately for a proper lady, but she's never given too many fucks about that anyhow. “You know at least as well as I do, trust me.”

“Fuck me, is this really what it's come to?” he asks, swirling whatever vile thing he's drinking in his glass. “Sitting here having the most pathetic 'who has it worse' conversation ever with my former goddess wife, who never much liked me in the first place?”

“You make it hard to like you. You're very talented at that.”

“Among many other things.”

He laughs at the face she makes at that one, and it's absurd how pleased she is by that, that she can make him laugh. It reminds her a bit of Axl, of how much she'd always loved his easy laughter, and suddenly it's like a fist to her gut, guilt twisting up her insides even now that it's got no right to.

“What happened to Axl?” she asks, clinging to the edge of the bar like it could hold her there sober. “He's changed.”

“Of course he changed,” Anders says, after a long moment. “He grew up, which is highly overrated, by the way.”

“Just because you never could manage to do it-”

“Ah, but there's a difference between _couldn't_ and _didn't want to_ ,” he says. “Just never saw much profit in it.”

“You never got sick of it, everyone looking at you like you were a fuckup all the time?” This earns her a glare, but there's not much heat in it, and she just shrugs. “I'd have gotten sick of it. Even Axl always thought you were useless. Except at getting him pissed, maybe.”

Anders smirks down at the bar, but to Gaia it's like seeing a ghost, a fragment of Bragi that's come loose like the edge of a mask. “And is that what you think, Gaia?” She watches the quick flutter in his throat as he knocks back the rest of his drink, the way the light glints off the edges of his hair, flaring unreasonably bright for a second, and tries to push back the slow throb of her blood, rising in her like a memory of high tide. “That I'm just a worthless fuckup?”

“The fuckup part yes, definitely,” she says, and doesn't say the rest. To admit he's worthless wouldn't say much about her, and to admit she thinks he's not would say too much.

“How much of us really used to be two people,” she asks instead, “and how much was just _us_? I couldn't have stopped it, no matter how much I wanted to. But maybe...”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe I didn't want to. Not as much as I should have.” She's never told anyone how wrong it had felt, being with Axl after Idunn's invasion, how she'd held onto him and tried with everything she had to be just Gaia, and how it had failed, and left her feeling wrong, like a stranger wearing her own skin. Around Axl, her blood had hummed, god seeking god, but around Anders, it had burned.

She can't quite decide, here and now, how much burn is alcohol and how much is him.

“Doesn't make it your fault,” he says, picking up his jacket. “You hated me, I found you immensely irritating, and we still couldn't keep our hands off each other. Neither of us has any reason to feel guilty and none of it matters anymore anyhow, so can we just drop it, for fuck's sake?”

“Anders,” she calls as he walks away, and maybe he only stops because she actually used his name for once, but she can't stop to think about that right now, because if she thinks she won't be able to say it - “Maybe it does still matter. To me.”

“Tell me you don't still feel it,” she says, and under any other circumstances she'd be concerned about the way it feels like fine tremors are racing down her limbs, the way her stomach feels like a black hole, constricting inside her. “Tell me it was all Bragi, and I'll believe I'm imagining things and maybe then I can go get on with my life.”

“What the hell,” he says, “Easy enough to sort that one out,” and suddenly the bar's at her back and his mouth is on hers, and she's left drowning, because this, oh _this_ feels like coming home.

***

“I don't think you're worthless,” she says much later, into the dim light of his bedroom.

“Of course not,” he says, “after that succession of orgasms I gave you, at least ninety percent of which I'm certain were real-”

“Be quiet,” she commands, and amazingly enough, he actually shuts up. “I was trying to be nice. Because I honestly don't. Think you're worthless, I mean. I think...you could be worth quite a lot. If you wanted to be.”

It's the wanting to be, of course, that makes all the difference, that hangs in the balance.

“I'm not sure that's something I know how to want,” he says finally. “Seems more your style. Being worth something.”

She had wanted to be worth something, once. A long time ago, back when she thought she could make a raft out of the Gaia who Axl valued, the Gaia who knew who she was and what she wanted and who she loved; a raft that could keep her floating in the flood of Idunn that overwhelmed her. But all she'd been worth in the end was a broken heart and a ruined life, and the resurrection of something that probably should have stayed dead.

“Look,” Anders says, “all that crap about you being two people, about other people only loving something that wasn't real – it's bullshit. The gods we were, they were attracted to us because of the people we already were. Crap people get crap gods, good people don't. So stop with the self pity, alright? You're fine as you are. You always were.”

“I think that's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me.” Since the list of things he's ever said to her that could be qualified as sweet is limited to pretty much this one offering, she's sure that's true, as far as it goes. But more than that – it feels true, for the first time. She rolls the words around in her head, twists them around her tongue – _yes, this is me, I chose this for myself_ – and likes the way they sound. _Free_.

“Good, will it get you to stop talking? Because there are only two things I like to do in this bed, and neither of them involves going on about feelings.”

Trust him to go and ruin the moment. “Shut up, Anders,” she says, shifting herself against him, fitting her body comfortably against his, waiting to see if he'll pull away. “And Bragi wasn't such a crap god,” she says, quiet but final. If she can't pity herself anymore, neither can he.

There's no answer, but he stays put.

“I won't kill you this time, right?” he says softly, after long enough that she's on the edge of sleep, warm and hazy and safe.

“No,” Gaia says, and means it. “You can't, not anymore.”


End file.
